Fairies, Shoes and a Dog Bed…in Texas. Oh yeah, and Indiana.

My husband and I recently had a very strange experience and I hope one or a shitload of you might have some insight into this incident.

About a month and a half ago, we took a weekend drive down to the hill country in our home state of Texas. We wound up driving back home in the dark the next evening and it was a very pleasant drive until suddenly, on the side of the dark, country road we were on, I caught sight in the headlights of 2-3 small shapes crouched next to the road. Not just near the road but literally with their knees on the white edge lines on the pavement. I kind of freaked out a little because my first impression was of small children crouched down like runners waiting for the bang of the starting gun. I yelled out loud because I was sure we were going to hit these kids!

I was also a little (a lot) panicked because it brought back memories of an incident many years ago when we rented a motor home for a trip to Florida. We were driving at night to avoid traffic and were just on the outskirts of Alma, Georgia. Out of nowhere and with no warning, a group of young people, probably early teens, jumped out of some bushy growth by the side of the road and they ALL hurled big rocks directly at our windshield. The motor home sustained significant damage but luckily we were unharmed and we didn’t wreck.

So, that was the first thought I had when I saw these small figures at the edge of the roadway. We made it past them but I was freaking stunned that we hadn’t hit them. It was so shocking, not only because of the suddenness of seeing them in the dark that way, or almost hitting them…but what the hell were they doing out there? We were in the middle of absolute nowhere. No houses, no street lights, nothing. And these ‘children’ at first glance appeared to very small indeed…as in the 3-4 year old range. I couldn’t see their faces at all but the shapes of their bodies were very apparent.

Well, we were obviously shaken by this but as with all strange encounters, as the days wore on, we kind of forgot about it.

Flash forward to two weeks ago. We took a road trip to Indiana where my husband was born and raised and where his family still lives. One night a lot of his family came over and we were all sitting around talking when a nephew and his wife arrived. After a minute or two of chit chat, the wife said ‘Something really bizarre happened to us last night’. She said they’d been driving home and passed a group of ‘little people’ crouched down on the very edge of the road. They swerved to miss them. She said it was the weirdest thing she’d ever seen. By ‘little people’ she was actually referring to small people or what some people would impolitely call midgets nowadays. When she said this, the hair on my arms literally stood up and my whole body got cold. I’m telling you, I was totally flipping and the story had just begun. I was all ears.

She said she had told one of her neighbors about it the next morning, the same day she was relating this to us, and the neighbor had already heard from someone else about them. This other person had actually turned around and gone back and asked them what they were doing. One of them replied that they were on their way to California to find Jesus.

Ok.

To illustrate how freaky this response was, you have to understand where my in-laws actually live. They are surrounded by corn and soy bean fields in every direction. Thousands upon thousands of acres of Indiana farmland and oil fields for miles any way you go. They can’t even get internet service where they are. The nearest highway, much less a west bound interstate is at least 50 miles away. If they were on their way to Cali, they were taking the worst possible route that could ever be imagined.

Well, the morning of this day when she related this story to us, my husband had seen a rather large dog bed on the side of the very rural road in question. A little farther down, there was a pair of shoes just sitting there neatly placed by the edge of the road. The wife of my husband’s nephew said these shoes, which she also saw that following morning, were left in the exact location where they saw the little people. The next day after she related the story to us, that dog bed had been moved to a clearly visible location in the weeds just 50 feet or so from my mother-in-law’s driveway. I saw the dog bed at it’s new location and also noticed there was some kind of a handwritten note laying inside. Now we both think it’s really strange that we were not compelled to go and see what that note said but it’s like we instinctually avoided it.

I guess my question is this…are there any legends or bits of folklore about fairies or brownies, etc., showing up in extremely rural locations like this on the very edge of roads at night? Or leaving shoes or other strange items like this?

These two incidents, so specific and so very odd and happening on 2 weeks or so apart…can this be coincidence? I am very open to folklore and the fairy faith however I am also open to other explanations. What in the HELLO MOTHER MARY do you guys think this was??

I seriously can’t stop thinking about this and I’m pretty sure my hubs is weirded out and ready to not hear about this anymore.

I’d love to hear from you guys if you have some super strange experiences to share.